Evan Hunter's "The Blackboard Jungle" is the most realistic account I have ever read of life in a New York City vocational high school. I can testify to its accuracy, having had some years of experience in one of them, as has Mr. Hunter. His novel more than matches the sensations in some of the stories we have seen recently, in newspapers that have become happily school-conscious. But it is free of their distortions and dishonesty; it makes no easy moral assumptions nor does it arrive at righteous judgments. Mr. Hunter's North Manual Trades High—it is fairly typical—is a complex organism, the resultant of many forces, economic facts, social emotions, hostilities, suspicions. It can, if it is not to be considered irreparable, be handled only with understanding, courage, in the last analysis, humanity. Nothing else will work. You won't find that in the newspaper accounts, but it is here, implicitly stated in Mr. Hunter's story, and Richard Dadier, the young teacher, is a human and spirited embodiment of that statement.
Dadier's history as we read it covers one term, five months, of teaching in his new job at North Trades. It should be said at once that Mr. Hunter has telescoped a vast body of material into that five months. Nobody ever experienced so much, learned so much in one term of teaching. The alternative, of course, would be a longer and less integrated document, and I am willing to accept this telescoping as a necessary device. Otherwise Dadier's history is incontrovertible. If you have been teaching in a vocational high school for four years, all of this has happened to you, or your neighbor. You have been greeted with, "Hey, teach'!" You have set down some requirements and been told, "Dig that cat, he's playin' it hard," or "Teach', you ever try to fight thirty-five guys at once?" You have faced the cold war in the classroom, and sometimes the hot war in the stairwells or outside the school on a dark night. You have seen the offerings you made riotously rejected—the phonograph records broken, the pictures delaced, the windows and blackboards cracked. And you have had to face a boy with a knife. (pp. 16-17)
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